The Serial (Prion Humour Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Cyra McFadden, Tom Cervenak: Books

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Product Description

Synopsis

"The Serial" is a soap opera set in Marin Country, California. It follows Kate and Harvey's Holroyd's attempts to keep up with their wacked-out neigbours' fashionable credentials - a year in which they have a trial separation and experiment unsuccessfully with alternative partners and lifestyles.

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews

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4 star:		(1)
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Average Customer Review

4.0 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can you dig it?, 23 Jun 2003

By A Customer

This is a splendid satire of what happened when the counter culture began to trickle down the affluent middle classes in the 1970s.Kate and Harvey are a typical Marin County couple. They've dropped their previous square lifestyle (where Kate got off on baking cookies and starching the kitchen curtains) to get in touch with their real selves. This involves scream therapy, encounter groups, consciousness raising sessions, dope and granola. The book follows an uneventful year in their lives when they experiment with an open marriage, life on a commune, and a series of new and ultimately disastrous partners. It's pretty tough on their daughter Joan (who joins the Moonies) and their pets, Donald Barthelme (an afgan, who doesn't survive his mistress' affair with a poodle-groomer)and Kat Vonnegut Jr (a cat). The book was originally written in short weekly episodes,like Bridget Jones Diary, and the style of humour is very like The Diary of a Nobody or the Mapp and Lucia books: lots of bathos and a series of mini-sagas that overlap. Despite everything Kate and Harvey are quite sympathetic (they both secretly hanker after their old lifestyle). I thought it was very funny and prescient. The truth is that nowadays we ALL live in Marin County!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very funny book about life in the San Francisco Bay area, 1 May 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Serial (Picador Books) (Paperback)

This very funny book is set in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1970s, and exposes the zany attitudes of the Bay Area subculture for our amusement. Based on acute observation and almost entirely without "agenda", the book sends up, for example, feminists and male chauvinists with magnificent impartiality. It may possibly be a little dated now and may contain one or two references which will be obscure to someone who has not spent some time in the Bay Area, but it is still one of the funniest books ever written.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great fun, 15 Nov 2000

By	"anonymouspootle" - See all my reviews

This book is great fun - with lovely humorous illustrations giving a real feel for the 70s My mum read it and commented on the fun of reading a book for adults with pictures! Its a very easy and funny read. McFadden says in the introduction that the book is really about language and this is true but underestates the fun of the plot It made me very much want to read more boks set in California of the 70s

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